


Raised Sepulchre

by JediDryad



Series: February Fluff: 28 Ways Luke and Mara Get it Together at last. [15]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy - Michael P. Kube-McDowell
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Childhood Trauma, Depression, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Luke needs a hug, and therapy, but there is smut, february fluff, grief smut, hints of Jake, rough sex - consensual, sexual healing, so does Mara, the least fluffy fluff, traumatic grief, traumatic reactions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:28:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29415624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JediDryad/pseuds/JediDryad
Summary: As a heads up, this is the grimmest, darkest, most angst filled, and traumatic of the series. It has a happy ending though.So, this is Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy Luke: the Luke who actually does abandon his family and the galaxy in a moment of apocalyptic threat in order to lick his many wounds. This Luke then gets conned by a woman named Akanah into a tacky little affair on a scam of a hunt for his mother but we’re not going that far.He starts out his little pity party holed up in an old fortress of Vader’s in some, apparently uninhabited, part of Coruscant where even Leia can't find him. I think a certain ST writer/director was quite fond of this Luke.So here is some catharsis for me and anyone else who watched TLJ and thought, “You know who Luke needs to hear from right now while he’s brooding over his grief and failures?Mara.”
Relationships: Mara Jade/Luke Skywalker
Series: February Fluff: 28 Ways Luke and Mara Get it Together at last. [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2129439
Comments: 16
Kudos: 27
Collections: Luke Deserves All The Blowjobs





	Raised Sepulchre

For the first time in the years they’d known each other, Skywalker was not happy to see her. Mara could tell as she stood in front of him in the vast empty room. She supposed the surprise was mostly that it had taken so long. Granted, she had been avoiding him in anticipation of this outcome for over a year now. It still hurt more than she would have expected. Some part of her had counted on Luke being glad to see her. It had been a constant that was now gone.

But the news of his disappearance and his choice of isolation spot was enough to risk the final implosion of whatever tenuous allyship remained after she renounced her training and followed a less spiritual path. He’d seemed to take it personally.

“How did you find me?” He was accusing, and underneath, she sensed an exhaustion. He felt trapped.

“Solo said he’d come to see you at some weird fortress.”

She took a deep breath, “I knew which one it had to be.”

Mara glanced briefly around the vast dim space that was oddly devoid of the myriad Sith images and artifacts she’d always associated with Darth Vader.

“I didn’t realize it was still here, though. I’d heard it was destroyed.”

“Yes, it was. I raised it from the sea and pieced it back together.”

“Oh.” Mara knew her pitch was a bit higher than usual. He made it sound like the work of a few minutes, incidental. That Luke could do some rather spectacular things with the Force was not a surprise to her or anyone else for that matter, but, in this case, it also didn’t seem like a good thing.

She pursed her lips into a flat line.

“Why?”

“Seemed like a good place to get away and be alone for a while.” The look he gave her was baleful. She was an intrusion on his solitude.

“Luke.”

Both of them blinked at the sound of a third voice.

Another intrusion. The voice was soft, soothing and very feminine.

Mara spun around in a defensive stance as she heard Luke call for the lights to come up. She hadn’t sensed any danger but anyone who decided that surprising the two of them was a good idea needed to learn they were very wrong.

The woman who stood there appeared to be about her age and was dressed to distract. How she’d gotten in was unclear but Mara was more concerned about why she was there. Did Luke know her?

She watched silently as he inspected the intruder who smiled softly as Luke touched her, ostensibly to make sure she wasn’t an apparition. He’d clearly had no doubts about Mara’s physical presence.

Once he’d satisfied himself that she was flesh and blood, the dark eyed woman started gushing about him being the son of Anakin Skywalker and claiming that she’d been led there by his rebuilding of the fortress.

This did not ease any of Mara’s concerns about this being, and they only grew as she introduced herself as a Fallanassi and declared his mother to be alive.

Mara glanced over at Luke expecting skepticism and was appalled to see him apparently hanging on “Akanah’s” every word.

Her words were quite convincing, Mara had to admit. The woman definitely had some powers even if they manifested differently. She remembered whisperings about the disgraced Fallanassi and their “cosmic Force”. They’d betrayed the Empire and been forced into hiding. That was not a point against them by any means, but there was something about this woman that made Mara feel they were being invited on a Morodin hunt. Or, to be more precise, that Luke was being coerced into one. Her attitude towards Mara was frosty.

So far as she could tell, Akanah was using all the cloying holopress articles about Skywalker and his trials and hardship combined with her own Cosmic Force abilities to read Luke and hit him hard in just the right places: his father, the dark side, his romantic failures. 

“You must fear that someday you will find yourself ready to kill your own son and him ready to kill you.” *

Mara rolled her eyes.

Of course he did. He was a compassionate human who hadn’t been lobotomized lately. Although, Skywalker brought that idea into question when he asked with tremulous credulty, 

“How do you know all this?”

So his problem wasn’t that he’d been reading his own press.

And then she hit him with the hypnotic ask: “your heart is telling you you must come with me.”

“I’m fairly certain it’s your heart telling him that.” Mara spoke up. She made her voice louder than necessary and watched Luke startle. Yes, Akanah was doing something more than just fawning and pleading.

The other woman looked at her with scathing contempt.

“You were not part of the vision” she said with the dismissive air of one who expected her wisdom to be accepted without question.

Mara bared her teeth in her smile. “I stay out of the holos.”

Luke acknowledged her reaction with a disapproving stare as Akanah launched into earnest assertions that Luke could test her if he wished. They seemed to be working because he said that would be unnecessary.

“You’re just planning to take off without telling anyone, then?” Mara was surprised by the depth of the anger she fought to keep out of her voice.

It seemed to work though. He decided he needed to tell Leia at least.

“How about you leave your comm contact” Mara suggested firmly, “and he’ll get back to you if he decides he wants to take you up on your… generous offer.”

“Is that what you want, Luke?” There was steel in her voice and Mara felt her left arm tingle as her body instinctively prepared for a fight. 

“I really should speak with Leia.” he sounded apologetic and Akanah turned instantly gracious and said she’d be back in the morning.

Then, as she had come, she was gone.

Luke whirled on Mara.

“Why were you being so rude to her? She might have had the answers I need.”

Mara felt her eyes go wide and the unused adrenaline rose in her.

“Well if you still think so tomorrow, you can give her a call, but I don’t think she had any more answers than the hundred other women who’ve claimed to have leads on your family.”

“You don’t understand.”

Mara fought to keep her calm at his ludacris assertion. Not knowing much about one’s parents was definitely something she understood.

He started pacing.

“I’ve been here for weeks, walking, meditating.”

“Have you been eating? Sleeping?” 

His expression was withering.

“I’ve focused on the Force. I allowed time to merge into an indistinct flow. And she was the first inkling of an answer I’ve gotten.”

Mara gritted her teeth.

“You were meditating on your mother?

“No, I…”

“Luke, that was a random stranger.”

“She found her way here.”

“So did I”

“Yeah but you always know how to find me.”

Mara’s mouth fell open. He had noticed. It didn’t matter. She forced it to close.

“Show me around?”

“Sounds like you should be showing me around.” His voice was almost a snarl.

“I’ve never been here. I just knew it existed.”

“S’more than I knew,” he muttered, bitterness rolling off him in waves now. Several proverbs about cosmic scales being balanced and roles being reversed flitted through Mara’s mind. She’d said much worse to him in the past, she reminded herself as she fought to keep a mild expression on her face and let him decide if he was going to do as she asked.

“Fine”, Luke grumbled and seemed to drop the subject of the Fallanassi woman for the time being at least. 

Mara followed Luke through the various expansive rooms, their steps echoing despite themselves. The place was enormous and reminded Mara of the opulent excess of her Imperial days. It was designed to overpower and intimidate; and yet now she wondered what in space Vader had done with all these rooms when he’d led such a solitary existence. Moreover, she wondered what Luke intended by being here.  
She realized she’d slowed and he’d stalked on ahead of her so she picked up her pace to catch him. Luke kept his hood up, robes fluttering behind him in a way that triggered even more unpleasant memories than the general aura of the building already had: drenched in despair. It was like parts of the palace. She could see the cracks in the walls where Luke had pieced the rubble back together. What the kriff was he thinking? What was he looking for and why did he think he would find anything here?

Except for a travel cooker and some tools, the place was empty. Luke hadn’t brought any furniture with him. That suggested he didn’t plan to stay, which seemed hopeful. He’d had a rough few years, she knew. 

Most likely, he didn’t have any sort of plan.

“So, is this a vacation?” she asked after they’d returned to the first room. She tried not to seem incredulous.

“Ah, the interrogation begins.” Luke grumbled, “and you started with that?”

His bald disdain was so unexpected Mara fought back a chuckle.

“Fair enough, Skywalker.”

“So you’re here to get away from things.” She tried another approach: no snide interruptions this time.

“That would make sense at least. You have a lot of people demanding things of you.”

He glared.

“You’ve been talking to Leia.”

“No I haven’t.”

“It’s time to let them figure things out for themselves,” he muttered, “I keep messing them up anyway.”

Kriff. When Luke Skywalker lost his shiny hero glow, he really lost it.

“Why here?”

“Where else would I go?”

Where else would he go?

“I don’t know: Shulxi, Ithor, Chandrila, Hoth if you want to really be alone. Anywhere, Skywalker. Anywhere other than Darth Vader’s old burrow.”

“Burrow?”

“It’s what Palpatine used to call it - to me at least. ‘Vader’s off to hide in his burrow’. I wasn’t supposed to think much of it.”

“Is that why you think I shouldn’t be here?”

“No, pretty sure that’s because you shouldn’t be here.”

Luke met her glare with one of his own. Mara could see the pain in his eyes, the weeks of scruff covering cheeks that had grown too thin. She thought of the way he’d insisted on believing Akanah.

He was desperate, but for what?

She felt utterly out of her depth. Soothing the souls of depressed jedi masters was possibly the exact opposite of any skill she had. Maybe he’d have better luck with this Akanah being. He clearly needed something.

“You know, I only saw him once.” 

His voice echoed.

“Who?”

“The galaxy thinks I’m always talking to the old jedi. I saw my father once. It was within hours of his death.

I’ve never seen him since.”

“Maybe you don’t need him.”

“That’s what Leia said.”

“She might be right.”

He threw his head back.

“She doesn’t understand.”

Mara listened to the plaintive tone in his voice and felt it echo inside her.

“Explain it to me.”

“Why do you think you would understand?”

Mara flinched, and her reflexive defenses rose.

“I don’t. If your sister doesn’t get your pain, who am I to presume I might? I’m an ex evil assassin”

“You were never evil.”

His comment was so offhandedly certain, it stopped her in her tracks. Even in this cynical, depressed state, he was so certain of that. It was enough to make her cry.

But that wouldn’t help anyone right now.

“Your opinion is noted. Maybe telling me will help you figure it out. You’ve never been like this about your parents before.”

He’d always seemed to grieve them quietly, like the rest of his friends. 

“Mara, I’m alone.”

His voice echoed in the vast room again.

“Leia has Han. She has the kids. She is building a new Republic. Her life is focused forward.”

Mara nodded quietly to herself. Leia was building something new. Luke felt he was charged with restoring something old.

“You don’t see that sort of future for yourself. So you’re looking at the past to figure yourself out?”

He nodded and gestured to the darkening rooms

“And I’ve just found nothing.”

“Well, maybe that’s the lesson.”

“That there’s nothing here for me?”

“There isn’t.”

He glared at her again but she was defiant.

“Luke, how could there be? This is where Vader disappeared to whenever he’d failed Palpatine - or at least that’s what Sheev wanted me to think. Can’t you sense the sadness here?”

“I thought that was me.”

Mara squeezed her eyes shut as a cavalcade of conflicting emotions surged through her. Vader was a shadow to him: looming large and morphing with the changing light and lens of time. He needed to know the true shape of that shadow so he could put it in its place, behind him.

She felt claustrophobic and made her way to the closest window so she could take a deep breath. Knowing what she had to do to help Luke, didn’t make doing it any easier. She felt like she was suffocating in remembered emotion, drowning in memories that tugged her - hand over hand -into a pit of darkness. Talking about it was reliving it. She dug her fingers into the windowsill and willed the universe to right itself.

Finally she spoke.

“Vader was different from the Emperor.”

Luke was at her side before she’d completed the sentence, something desperate and hungry in his eyes. It was what made it possible for her to continue pushing through the nauseating shame of the memories.

“Palpatine was a sadistic maniac. He delighted in torment and torture. He was mercurial and created fear and chaos. He would pit his agents against one another just to watch them fight to the death.”

She stopped and met his intense gaze.

“You know that. He did it to you.”

Luke swallowed and nodded.

She looked away.

“He did it to me too. I won.”

She looked out the window and watched the stars slowly appear in the sky as night settled over the hemisphere. This might be the only part of Coruscant where they were visible from the surface. A tiny, sad smile tugged at her lips as she considered the implications: infinitesimal parallels.

“Vader didn’t do that.” she continued, “He probably could have in other circumstances, but he didn’t. He was numb. I always thought that he was doing what he did because he had no will left not to. Nothing to live for and no strength to die.” 

Luke’s gaze sharpened.

“Ben said he was ‘more machine than man’.”

She felt her lip twist unpleasantly.

“How would Artoo feel about that description?”

Luke shook his head and dropped his eyes to the floor sheepishly. 

“I used to think it was pathetic, but then my idea of what wasn’t pathetic was atrociously narrow, and wasn’t really my own idea.”

Mara let the waves of guilt and shame flood across her. She wondered if there would be a day they would stop coming. She was fairly certain she wouldn’t deserve that day if it came.

“He changed after he learned about you. There was a new drive about him. I noticed it even though I didn’t understand it at the time. It was a sort of mad fervour. It made him dangerous in a way he hadn’t been before.”

She caught Luke’s raised eyebrow.

“- Dangerous to Palpatine in a way he hadn’t been before,” she corrected herself, acknowledging the billions of beings for which Vader had been quite dangerous enough well before Luke had turned up.

“An actual threat to his power.”

“Because of me?”

“That’s why he wanted you dead, remember?”

He nodded and she gripped the sill wondering if it would ever get easier to talk about this stuff.

“I remember the day I left to go to Jabba’s palace. It was the last time I saw either of them. Vader was waiting for me as I got to the hanger for my shuttle. Our relationship… no one knew anyone else all that well. Palpatine kept it that way. We all distrusted one another, and for good reason. It was odd to find him at my ship. I assumed he must have learned about my mission and had come to threaten me or stop me. I didn’t really think he would try to kill me, but it was always possible.

That’s why it sticks with me that all he did was say, “May the Force be with you on your quest.”

Luke made a small noise.

“I thought he was such an idiot. I was off to destroy his treasonous plans - although what he wanted with you, I didn’t know - and he was offering me a blessing. Then later, I thought he had been taunting me because he knew I would fail and you two would kill Palpatine and destroy me instead.

Now, I just don’t know.”

“Maybe he just knew he wouldn’t see you again.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe he cared.”

Mara looked at Luke thoughtfully.

“No. I don’t think he cared much about me, and that’s fine. I didn’t care much about him. My focus was elsewhere. So was his.”

She set her mouth.

“You talk about the good that was still in him. I don’t know - because I don’t know how much of my perceptions at the time have been permanently warped by Sheev’s machinations - but I never experienced much good in him.”

She took a deep breath uncertain as to whether anything she was suggesting was real or just another misinterpretation of her experiences. And she didn’t know if her thoughts would be a balm or a bomb, but she could feel Luke’s sorrow as it verged on despair and she had to offer whatever she could.

“I don’t think Darth Vader gave a damn for any living being except for one. I think he was half dead and lived with ghosts, and I know how that sucks the life out of you.”

Luke’s gaze sharped and she knew he remembered how she’d been in the first months they’d known one another.

“I think, maybe, you were the good you saw in him.”

Luke blinked.

“You were the only being he ever cared about, Luke. He gave up everything for you.”

He closed his eyes and seemed to waver on his feet.

“So what would you - the only light about him - expect to find in this place where he came when he was at his lowest, his emptiest, his most despairing?”

Luke pressed his head against the window frame in a pose Mara recognized deep in her soul.

“The darkest, lowest, emptiest parts of myself.”

He let out a deep shuddering breath and Mara had her arms around him before the first tear fell. They slid down to the floor together as Luke came apart in her arms, weeping for the family he’d never known, and the loss of the one he’d had. The betrayal of his father and the lies of the jedi he’d trusted. The unfairness of the burden that had been placed upon him and the way he’d had to face it alone. He never seemed to find anyone to share the path with him. The way he seemed to have been denied the family and future his sister had found. 

And when he’d screamed himself hoarse, when he’d run through all the bitter words of retribution to hurl at the sky, when he was out of tears, and felt light and insubstantial, his heart broken and as empty as his stomach, he turned his face to hers and stared at her as though seeing her for the first time. 

He glanced down and saw her arms and legs wrapped around him like restraints, holding him in place, like gravity. His red rimmed eyes met hers and she saw him recognize the tracks of sympathetic tears on her face.

He reached up a hand to brush one of her tears away.

“Force, Mara. I never wanted to make you cry.”

His finger was rough but the touch was soft and Mara found herself turning towards it. She dropped a kiss on his hand and Luke paused. He searched her face for a moment in uncertainty, and then he leaned in and tentatively kissed the tear off her other cheek. Before he could pull back too far, she caught his scruffy face in her hand and pressed a kiss to his lips.

He responded instantly, settling his hands on her shoulders and then clutching her sleeves in his fists as he unravelled under lips,. She stroked his cheek as he opened to her, mouth molding to hers. She could sense his passion warring with the exhaustion of grief. She could feel a gaping need, like a sucking wound. With soft nips and nudges, Mara coaxed him to the floor and dropped a kiss on his nose before smiling at him and ordering him to hold still.

With soft hands and a patience she was unaccustomed to wielding, she removed his cloak from his shoulders and dragged his shirt over his head. She kissed her way down his chest revelling in his sharp breaths as her lips dragged across his abdomen and made him shiver. He whimpered under her touch and she felt emboldened to do more, to draw out a greater reaction. She wanted to watch him lose himself in ecstasy as he had lost himself in grief.

With shaking, unseasoned fingers, she stripped him of his pants and basics. She added no fanfare to the removal of his boots, but slid her fingers slowly up his legs to his hips and the evidence of his arousal.

He moaned her name quietly and gasped as she took him into her mouth. 

Mara suckled at his head at first, swirling her tongue around the delicate velvety skin, dipping in and around ridges. She listened to his sharp inhalations as she activated sensitive nerves and felt him struggle to hold back an instinctive spasm. She encouraged him to trust that instinct by opening wide and sliding well down his length. Luke groaned and thrust into her. Mara met his motion and engulfed him as deeply as she could, sucking sharply. She began to move to meet his thrusts, exploring him with lips and tongue as she sought out the perfect pressure and delighted in his growing gasps and moans.

His flailing arms eventually found their way into her hair and she suddenly found herself held in place as, with one final thrust, he spilled in her mouth, breathing her name over and over as though his sentience had been reduced to one thought and that one word. Mara swallowed and cleaned every inch of him before sliding back up his body to collapse to the floor next to him. Had she needed this as much as he did?  
Would it mean anything later?

He closed his eyes and fell silent. She could see his chest heaving and noted again that he had grown too thin, almost gaunt in his weeks in the fortress. She reached over him to gather his cloak so he could sleep.

Luke clearly had other ideas though. As her arm came within reach, he grabbed it with one hand, slid the other back into her hair, and pulled her face to his. This kiss was one of stark want, naked vulnerability, and isolation. She could feel him against her thigh, hard again.

He plundered her mouth as he tugged on her clothes. She felt more than heard the groan that escaped her as his hands moved on her, setting nerves alight with his rough grasping touch. She heard fabric tear as he grew impatient to make her as bare as he was. He tugged her into his arms then, heat building between them. Then he scraped his teeth across her throat and moaned into her shoulder. His need was overwhelming, and he plunged inside her, flattening her against the stone floor as he set a wild, frenetic pace. She yelped as he moved faster than she could absorb, his hands grasping her hips hard enough to bruise, each thrust shuddering through her as he bounced her against the floor. Mara was lost in the flood of sorrow and possession he sent through her with every thrust. Luke was filling her with his need, clinging to her. She cried out in ecstasy as he yanked her closer, rubbing across her most sensitive patch again and again as he pounded into her. He dragged his fingers across her clit roughly, demanding her response as she spasmed around him.

“Come for me,” he ordered his voice a low growl, lost in the power of their joining. 

And she did, her whole body going rigid and then flying apart into a million pieces around him as her screams of pleasure echoed through the dark, empty halls.

Luke collapsed on top of her as his own orgasm ripped through him and left him gasping for breath, sweat dripping off his forehead onto her shoulder, a lone tear escaping from his eyes as she brought her arms around him. She tightened her grip on his back when he attempted to detach their bodies. He took her hint and held still. 

Then, softly, he turned her face to his and his expression was tender and incredulous.

“Mara,” he whispered, stroking her cheek with a damp hand, “I don’t deserve you.”

It was entirely the wrong thing to say.

She froze, and then she did pull back: the mood broken. All of her own insecurities reared up inside her, fed by her recent reminiscences: the nausea of her poisonous childhood, the horrible things she’d done. She gathered herself into a shivering mound out of arms’ reach and willed everything to just disappear.

He was right. He didn’t deserve her. That was why he’d never chosen her before. Who was she to take advantage of his momentary weakness to carry out her own ridiculous pretensions? 

Naked on the cold floor, in the dark, surrounded by the suffocating despair of the fortress, she was flung back into the days she’d dredged up for him. She remembered the nights she'd spent in prostrate supplication on the floor of the throne room, denied her evening meal and bed for some mistake or misbehaviour. She no more suited the necessary moulds required of her now than she had back then. Of course she could serve no purpose here but a therapeutic fuck, a reminder of human connection. 

When he was feeling better, he would find someone he did deserve. Someone who wasn’t a murderer, who wouldn’t make his work harder for him. Of course she would be left in the darkness where she belonged.

“Why do you think you make anything harder for me?”

His voice was steady, the question calm; but the haze was gone from expression. He was alert and his sense shimmered with sympathetic anger.

She stared over at him. How had he heard her thoughts?

“I tried to kill you.” 

He rolled towards her then, hand reached out to her, forehead lined with concern.

“You talked about killing me a lot.” There was a soft smile on his face. 

“I don’t recall you actually trying.”

She wasn’t prepared for that smile. It wasn’t as wide as the grins she remembered, but it was a real smile. It seemed as though her struggles reminded him of who he was. And, Force, he was irresistible like this: stretched out naked in the starlight, eyes suddenly bright.

“I’m still here. That’s how I know you didn’t try.”

He tried again to usher her closer, eyes soft, as though he saw something in her she couldn’t see in herself. He’d always looked at her like that, she realized. Fighting to trust that gaze, she reluctantly crawled into his open arms and let him fold her against him. He drew his cloak around both of their bodies, swaddling them in it like a cocoon, sheltering them both from the oppressive darkness just outside this space.

“I’ve wanted to tell you for years that you’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met,” He murmured, “I just never thought you wanted to hear it from me.”

He kissed her hair.

“I’m sorry I was so miserable when you got here. Thank you for knowing where I was. Thank you for telling me those things. I know that was hard. I - just, thank you.”

There was warmth in him now. She could feel him pushing it towards her: offering a healing light for the pain he’d shared and how it had hurt her. He had both in him. He knew it, she realized. And he knew that she did too.

She accepted his warmth and wrapped her arms around him.

“This isn’t a good place, Luke.”

He kissed her forehead.

“I know. I’m not staying.”

She could feel his muscles shift as he moved to survey the surroundings again.

“You were wrong though.” 

She craned her head to meet his gaze.

“There was something here for me. You.”

She felt her mouth fall open at the clear sincerity of his words. Then she let him kiss her again, and this time there was promise in the kiss. He wanted to kiss her more, and in better places. She wanted him to. That realization was overwhelming in a totally different way.

She let a laugh escape her as she settled more comfortably against him, disbelief fading into certainty that there was light ahead for them and they could find it together. She traced a finger softly along his bicep.

“Y’know, Farmboy, I don’t think anyone else ever had this much fun here.”

Luke grinned. “I’m sure you’re right. I guess that makes it worth it.

She raised an eyebrow at him, skeptical.

He nuzzled her neck, “Wanna go again?”

“Mmm, tempting,” she admitted, “But you need to sleep and eat first. I’m not having you collapse on me out of exhaustion.

He tightened his grip. “Yes, Mara.”

She could hear the glee in his voice. He was finally starting to sound like himself again.

They lay quietly together for a while. Luke was absently stroking her shoulder and when he stopped, she thought he had drifted to sleep at last.

Then he spoke again.

“I don’t know if I can just decide there’s nothing out there for me to learn about my parents. I’m not like Leia. I grew up feeling their absence.”

“Your aunt and uncle?”

“They made their loss real. They loved me, but they were always clear that there had been other people who had been my parents. They left a space in my life for them. I do need to know. If there’s a chance I can find out more, I think I need to take it.”

Mara nodded into his chest.

“I understand. So when this Akanah woman comes back, do you want to go with her and see if she’s telling the truth?”

“No,” Luke leaned in and kissed her, “I know she’s not.”

“We could go anyway and catch her in her deception.”

He grinned.

“Do you think you were included in her invitation?”

“Not at all. That’s what would make it fun.”

He kissed her then until her sharp smile softened into a sigh of desire and, sleep forgotten, they were happily lost in one another again.

**Author's Note:**

> I have left most of the exchange between Luke and Akanah intact - except, of course when she talks to Mara. That line about Mara not being part of the picture is completely my fabrication. And Mara, of course, was not originally there.
> 
> Also, for the record, there's nothing particularly seductive or distracting about the way Akanah is dressed in any of the images I have seen of her. Mara is not always the most reliable narrator.


End file.
